As a revenue leader, you oversee and integrate sales, marketing, and customer success operations — the three main revenue-generating teams.
Your goals? Streamlining processes. Optimizing revenue generation.
Your challenges? Empowering your team to take charge and see the bigger picture, the organization’s larger goals. Balancing priorities. Fostering collaboration.
Anil Kumar, Principal of the Strategic Resource Group at Thomas H. Lee Partners (and previous Head of Revenue Operations at Asana), joined us on The Run Revenue Show to share how he’s worked to accomplish these goals and address the many challenges a revenue leader faces.
Let’s start by defining what a RevOps leader does.
What does the Head of RevOps do (and not do)?
Head of Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the fastest-growing job in America according to LinkedIn's 2023 "Jobs on the Rise" list.
Here is how RevOps is often portrayed, to those not in a RevOps leadership role:
- MarketingOps + SalesOps + Customer Solutions mashed together into a single operations team.
- A business unit responsible for implementing and managing the organization’s tech stack.
Sure, that’s part of what makes up RevOps. But it’s so much more.
Anil loves revenue. He loves driving revenue and finding ways to be the accelerant, the catalyst for revenue.
“If you can find a way to be that catalyst — that leverage — for a sales team, for a go-to-market (GTM) team, you are doing RevOps right.”
— Anil Kumar
But, Anil says, top-notch RevOps leaders must also be the connective tissue across all GTM teams. “You need to be the ‘through thread’ from sales to post-sales and customer success through the actual deal lifecycle, even the pre-deal lifecycle into marketing. Finally, you need to be a thought partner.”
A catalyst.
An accelerant of revenue.
A thought partner.
That’s the profile of an excellent RevOps leader.
And caring. But it’s not enough for you, the leader, to care.
“Caring at scale” is the secret sauce of RevOps’ success
Caring as an individual is easy. As an individual contributor, as a manager, and as a manager of managers, you are in control of how much (or little) you care about the target — the goal — in front of you.
But that all changes as a RevOps leader. It is 100% still essential for the leader to care, but just one person “leading the care” is not enough.
“Caring at scale,” says Anil, “is finding a way to get us to care. Finding a way to see how we can drive impact. If I can find a way to get the people around me to care about the problem statement in front of them — not the ten problems across RevOps — if I can get them to care deeply about it the way that I care about it, then we're going to win.”
Anil continues, “A strong RevOps leader is not only the ‘tool admin,’ but also the owner of a forecasting and pipeline process, the owner of the person who will drive discipline and standardization and build that operating cadence. If you can find a way to drive your team and empower them to feel ownership of what they do ... that is the difference between being an administrator and a driver. It is deeply caring because you truly own the tool and the outcome.”
Anil believes it’s “a lot more fun” when you can get your team to believe in the impact of what they do — to have true ownership.” It becomes about the tangible impact. When they are vested in the outcome and care deeply about what they do, you maximize their potential.
Get the right people on your team.
Give them clarity of purpose.
Help them prioritize.
Motivate them by connecting the dots between what we are trying to do as a company (roadmap) and each team's vision and strategic focus areas.
This, per Anil, is what a true leader does to ensure “caring at scale” goes from idea to reality.
But can “caring at scale” really positively impact the business?
Can “caring at scale” impact revenue leak?
Of course.
And a critical way a revenue team (and its leader) can create positive change is by identifying the revenue you earned — but have not captured — due to breakdowns in the revenue process: Revenue leak.
This is often the result of deals that have been left dormant. Sales to customer success handoffs gone bad. Poor retention numbers. Less-than-ideal lead quality. And more.
Most of these issues are not realized until it’s too late — nearly 15% of committed deals are lost because of revenue leak.
Here’s how Anil recommends curbing that revenue leak through caring at scale.
First, what not to do: Tell your champion/tool driver to “build the forecasting process” without any background, any buy-in, or any previous experience with forecasting.
Instead, find a way to ensure that your champion is not just implementing the tool. They must fully understand its use case. They must be closely embedded in the day-to-day execution of the process.
This is how you create the buy-in, the vested interest, and the shared vision.
But that’s still not enough. You also need to have a strong enablement leader to drive the process.
Design + process + enablement is critical.
Add in true understanding of forecasting to every seller in the organization — have them connect sales to building a pipeline and creating a forecasting rhythm — and you have it made ... from the bottom up.
But one word that is implied yet not called out explicitly: collaboration.
True collaboration: The holy grail
If you’ve been in the business space for more than a minute, you know the importance of collaboration. From a RevOps perspective, that true collaboration between and among all the revenue-critical employees is what you strive for.
Can you get there 100%? Nope. But the goal is to optimize that collaboration.
Here’s how Anil suggests getting closer.
First, he reminds us, collaboration is a work in progress — highly imperfect. There is always room to grow.
To get there, you need to consider the problem your team is trying to solve. A big one for most B2B organizations? Revenue leak within the lead/demand funnel — from Marketing to SDR to AE (and eventually Customer Success), for true lifecycle marketing.
Collaboration is a must-have.
We mess this up most often because most of our teams — our programs — are built in silos.
Anil proposes this (very real-life) example:
Write the problem statement: I want to catalyze or accelerate the demand gen lead funnel.
Create the team: Bi-weekly (2x/month) pipeline meetings with all (option #1) or creating a “tiger team” (IC + Marketing + MarketingOps + SDR + RevOps) that meets daily.
While collaboration at the top (C-suite) is essential, the magic happens from a more bottom-up approach. You must get the doers, the problem solvers, in the room to build a cadence with behavior-driven goals that lead to the outcome (or output) you seek.
Finally, empower the team. What are the metrics? What’s going to move the needle? How will you drive leverage? Have the team come up with these answers and present them to leadership.
TL;DR:
Get the right people in the room. Get them to care. Have them create measurable objectives that are behavior-based.
Next up: Leverage. How do you help your teams identify where leverage may exist across the business?
You need prioritization before you can achieve leverage
Anil believes most people have a good idea of what they should do. They just need help with how to prioritize.
He suggests this model.
What is the one thing I'm going to do today? What are the two to three things (big rocks) I'll accomplish this week? Every morning, plan your day. This goes for ICs and managers.
And keep going. What do I have to do this month? What am I going to do this quarter to achieve success? How does that then drive and tie to our strategic plan over six months or 12 months?
“Connect the purpose to the roadmap with clarity,” says Anil.
It seems like the world is always on fire in RevOps. Everything is important.
“Points of leverage are absolutely important, but points of leverage and prioritizing them [are] — equally important.”
— Anil Kumar
Finally, systems.
Systems (and tool consolidation) help with prioritization
Wading through spreadsheets trying to perform a complex bottom-up forecast. Not fun.
Stuck in CRM trying to build reports. Not easy.
Task-switching between various BI tools with disparate data sources. Time-consuming.
Anil looks at this problem of tech stack bloat this way. “If I am absolutely overwhelming my admin because they're administering five different tools, having to figure out the use case for each, the value — that’s a recipe for failure.” And also something many of us are guilty of because we buy these tools over time and accumulate them.
When an under-resourced team (see: every RevOps team) administers too many tools, you're administering none.
This consolidation requires compromise, as different teams require different things. There is no simple answer, no one-size-fits-all solution.
Anil suggests “building your framework.” Uncover what’s the most important today and a year from now for your CEO/CRO. Understand the workflows that need to be optimized and/or are underutilized.
Clari is here to help with your framework. Our platform empowers teams to take control of the revenue process while consolidating your spend (single tool), simplifying your tech stack (saving money), and accelerating results (eliminating revenue leak).